Aiding ICD-10 Encoding of Clinical Health Records Using Improved Text Cosine Similarity and PLM-ICD

Abstract

The International Classification of Diseases, 10th edition (ICD-10), has been widely used for the classification of patient diagnostic information. This classification is usually performed by dedicated physicians with specific coding training, and it is a laborious task. Automatic classification is a challenging task for the domain of natural language processing. Therefore, automatic methods have been proposed to aid the classification process. This paper proposes a method where Cosine text similarity is combined with a pretrained language model, PLM-ICD, in order to increase the number of probably useful suggestions of ICD-10 codes, based on the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC)-IV dataset. The results show that a strategy of using multiple runs, and bucket category search, in the Cosine method, improves the results, providing more useful suggestions. Also, the use of a strategy composed by the Cosine method and PLM-ICD, which was called PLM-ICD-C, provides better results than just the PLM-ICD.